The following version of the novel was used to create this study guide: King, Stephen. Billy Summers. Scribner, August 3, 2021. Kindle.

In the last job novel Billy Summers by Stephen King, Billy Summers uses his abilities as a sharpshooter to eliminate bad people. His final job as a for-hire assassin balloons into multiple killings as he hunts down the man who ordered the killing of Joel Allen, an inmate who knew a secret that would destroy the man’s world.

Billy cannot help but take on one final job as an assassin for hire when he learns he will be paid two million dollars to kill Allen, a man he was told shot a 15-year-old boy walking home from school. Billy is uncomfortable with this job because Nick Majarian, a man who has hired him previously, is acting in a strange manner. Not only does Nick not seem to have all of the information about the shooting, but he also comes up with an escape plan for Billy, a part of the shooting Billy is generally left to take care of on his own. Billy has the sense that the people Nick claims will drive him to safety after Allen is dead are going to kill Billy.

On the day that Billy kills Allen, he escapes using his own plan to a safe house nearby. He believes he is justified in his fear Nick was planning to have him killed when Nick refuses to pay Billy even though he did the job. After Billy has stayed in the safe house long enough that he believes people are no longer actively looking for him, he sets off on a mission to find Nick. Along the way, he learns there is a six million dollar bounty on his head. He realizes a very powerful man must have called for Allen’s assassination if he has that much money to pay for Billy’s death.

At Nick’s Las Vegas home, Billy locks Marge Macintosh, who has been posted to guard the service entrance, out of the compound. Inside the house, Billy hits Marge’s son, Frank, over the head with a pistol hard enough to knock him unconscious. Billy finds Nick downstairs with several of his other underlings watching a football game. A shootout ensues, but Nick and Billy are left alive. Nick confirms that he did not call for the hit. Billy orders Nick to tell him who ordered the hit. Nick says it was Roger Klerke, the man who owns WWE, one of the four biggest media conglomerates in the world.

Klerke ordered Allen to kill his oldest son because he did not want him to inherit his business. Klerke feared Allen would use that secret against him to ask for a reduced sentence. To make matters worse, Klerke has a fetish for young girls. He asked for girls as young as ten-years-old to have sex with him because he wanted to know what the experience was like. Billy allows Nick to live, but vows to get revenge on Klerke.

As part of Billy’s plan, he uses Alice Maxwell, a girl he saved when she was dumped in front of his safe house after she was gang raped as bait to get Klerke’s attention. Klerke asks for Alice and Billy, in disguise, takes her to him. In Klerke’s house, Alice uses her own gun and kills Klerk herself.

On the way out of Klerk’s compound, Billy stops to pick up the gun Klerke’s bodyguard asked him to leave at the gate. He is confronted by Marge, whose son he put in a coma. She shoots him in the side before he is able to get away.

Beginning with Alice and Billy’s trip to confront Klerke, the story is written as if from the first-person point of view of Billy, the point of view from which Billy has been writing his autobiography off and on through the course of the novel. Billy writes that the bullet grazed his side, but was not fatal. He leaves Alice alone at a hotel with a letter telling her that she does not need to be with him. He says in the letter he is taking the laptop that contains his life story with him. He asks Alice to spend some time with his friend, Bucky, while she heals.

The novel concludes as Bucky reads the ending of Billy’s story from the laptop. He asks Alice what really happened. Alice tells him the wound was more serious than she had described it in the book. She preferred the thought that Billy left her instead of remembering how he died slowly over the course of several days as she drove him back to Bucky’s house. Alice laments that she will never be able to publish Billy’s story because it will put her in danger.